"It is clear that he does not pray, who, far from uplifting himself to God, requires that God shall lower Himself to him, and who resorts to prayer not to stir the man in us to will what God wills, but only to persuade God to will what the man in us wills"
About this Quote
Aquinas is doing what he does best: turning a spiritual practice into a diagnostic tool, then using it to expose a quiet form of arrogance. The line sounds pious, but it’s really an argument about directionality. Prayer, for him, is not a divine customer-service hotline; it’s a technology of reordering the self. If you treat it as leverage - a way to get God to “lower Himself” into your preferences - you’ve inverted the relationship and, in Aquinas’s view, evacuated prayer of its point.
The subtext is a critique of bargaining religion: the instinct to approach God as a stronger patron you can flatter, pressure, or persuade. Aquinas doesn’t deny that people ask for things; the sharpness is in the motive. The real failure isn’t requesting help, but refusing conversion. He frames authentic prayer as alignment: “to will what God wills.” That’s a hard sell in any era because it implies that your desires are not automatically trustworthy just because they’re yours.
Context matters. Writing within medieval scholasticism, Aquinas is defending a God who is not changeable in the human sense. If God’s will is stable and perfect, then prayer can’t be about altering God; it must be about altering the pray-er. That philosophical commitment gives the quote its bite: it insists that the drama of prayer is internal, ethical, and often inconvenient. It’s less “manifest your dreams,” more “submit your appetites to a higher good,” which is precisely why it still lands - it names the temptation to use spirituality as a mirror rather than a mirror-breaker.
The subtext is a critique of bargaining religion: the instinct to approach God as a stronger patron you can flatter, pressure, or persuade. Aquinas doesn’t deny that people ask for things; the sharpness is in the motive. The real failure isn’t requesting help, but refusing conversion. He frames authentic prayer as alignment: “to will what God wills.” That’s a hard sell in any era because it implies that your desires are not automatically trustworthy just because they’re yours.
Context matters. Writing within medieval scholasticism, Aquinas is defending a God who is not changeable in the human sense. If God’s will is stable and perfect, then prayer can’t be about altering God; it must be about altering the pray-er. That philosophical commitment gives the quote its bite: it insists that the drama of prayer is internal, ethical, and often inconvenient. It’s less “manifest your dreams,” more “submit your appetites to a higher good,” which is precisely why it still lands - it names the temptation to use spirituality as a mirror rather than a mirror-breaker.
Quote Details
| Topic | Prayer |
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